Comparative Essay - Intro Paragraph

Both John Donne’s ‘Elegy 19: To His Mistress Going to Bed’ and Marge Piercy’s ‘The Cast Off’ expose their main subject through a series of uncoverings that cumulate in the final praise of the uncovered female figure to fulfill both poem’s titles: in Donne, the imagined nudity of the “mistress” and in Piercy, the splitting of a cast to reveal the female speaker’s leg. However, while Donne’s gendered comparisons literally take ownership of the woman by progressing from the heavenly to the diminutive and objectified, Piercy’s progression from sexual descriptions of inanimate uncoverings to a finally desexualized description of a revealed woman removes the male hand from this female figure. By structuring her praised images in this way, Piercy allows the woman to reveal herself of her own will.